With the help of Tuia, I was able to modify the exe to allow the client exe to host games with 256 bots in mulitplayer co-op. But I was curious to know if this limitation applied to Instant Battle mode as I don't recall anyone attempting to change the max value for the Percentage of Bots slider in the Campaign/Instant Battle menu.

So I reverted to the original EXE (this version only had the widescreen hack, I did check to make sure multiplayer was capped at 64 with that version and it was) and then modified the meme files for CampaignMenu and SkirmishMenu. I increased the max bot count in the AIDefault.con file for my mod and then tried out the menu changes. It worked! Got 256 bots working in Instant Battle mode and this shouldn't need any hacks to the EXE!

Basically I changed the Slider node max value from 400 to 1600 (unlike the CreateGame menu, the player count is percentage based instead of an exact player count, this might be why we are able to get more bots in Skirmish Mode without EXE hacks). I tried something crazy like 3200 (this would in theory give me 512 bots), but the game crashed as it ran out of "descriptors" to assign to the players. So like multiplayer, the game has a memory allocation limitation and there can't be more then 256 players. So to be on the safe side just set the max bot count in your AiDefault.con file to 255 instead of 256 as you have to remember the human player counts towards the player population in Skirmish Mode just like in multiplayer. So you can safely have 255. But you can go ahead and try 256 bots if it turns out the game has a little leg room and allows 257 players.

It seems like nothing worked. I copied the two meme files into my mod's Menu.rfa file, then changed the AIDefailt.con file like I should have. What did I miss? (Everything is done in the mod, not vanilla BF1942)

That's strange I even tested this in the debugger exe and it worked there as well.

EDIT:

Ok I see what's going wrong. Most of the vanilla maps has this code line in the SingleplayerAxis/SingleplayerAllied.con files (Skirmish Mode uses these con files to setup the tickets and load the objectspawns/CPs)

Just tried it in vanilla on the retail exe. After creating a patch rfa for El Alamein to remove the max player count from the singleplayerAllied.con and SingleplayerAxis.con files, the mod worked correctly. There's something your not doing right with your mod. What mod are you doing this on? Does the mod already use a Menu_001.rfa file? Menu_002 or above won't work. I recall that the main rfas can only accept one patch files. The Game.rfa can't accept patch files at all, so you'll need to repack that one.

so where dose that file go? this is what I have been looking for. I want to increase the number of bots in single player mode for bf42 and bfv I have found where it said 400 % on bots and changed it to 1600 but did not get anymore bots than 64. any help would be great I do not know how to read codes so I get lost very easy and have just been changing numbers. I was able to increase the bot count in bf2 but it is simpler to understand. yours bluesman6 out